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From: Dan Douglas <ormaaj@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug
Subject: Re: quoted compound array assignment deprecated
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 16:05:04 -0500
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Sorry I meant to reply to that thread but ran out of time. I think Stephane's 
eventual proposal was pretty close to what I had in mind but expressed badly. 
I'm not sure why it was eventually decided to deprecate the current system 
entirely but I'm not opposed to the idea - especially if it provides no 
functionality for which there aren't easy workarounds.

The only thing I'm actively abusing this for at the moment in scripts I 
actually use is as a way of encoding 2D arrays. It's very much a read-only 
datastructure too.

~ $ ( key1=foo key2=bar; declare -A a=([foo]='([bar]=baz)') "b=${a[$key1]}"
typeset -p a b; echo "${b[$key2]}" )
declare -A a='([foo]="([bar]=baz)" )'
declare -A b='([bar]="baz" )'
baz

Any change will likely break this property but I think wrapping it in eval 
gives the same result.

-- 
Dan Douglas